Turning a side hustle into a full-time business is an amazing feeling, especially when your business generates passive income. You can earn passive income in several ways, but digital products are my favorite. If you’ve used a digital planner before or love planning and organizing, selling digital stickers is a fantastic option. Here’s how to take this side hustle and turn it into a full-time business.
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What are Digital Stickers?
Digital stickers are PNG images used to decorate digital journals, scrapbooks, and planners. Examples of digital stickers include cute animals, clip art, washi tape embellishments, word stickers, picture frames, note sections, hearts, and more.
Many people have transitioned to digital planning over the years to save money, paper, and space in their luggage, purse, or work bag. For years, digital planners and calendars were plain and lacked the finesse of traditional paper planners, which you could decorate with stickers, washi tape, and colorful pens. However, in recent years, digital stickers have taken off and are a popular way to personalize your digital planner, giving it a more customized, life-like feeling.
Can You Make A Living Selling Digital Stickers?
Yes! You can absolutely make a living selling digital stickers. Digital stickers are a thriving product that feeds off the popularity of digital planners.
Digital stickers usually only involve a small investment to start making, such as purchasing Canva Pro, and bundles are usually listed between $3 and $10. Once listed online, you can continue making money from the digital stickers bundle indefinitely, making this a fantastic, almost entirely passive income source!
You can even create digital planners to sell alongside your digital stickers, increasing the types of products you sell. Bundling a digital planner with stickers will also create a lucrative listing that you can price at a higher rate because you are offering more value to your customers.
Do You Need to be an Artist to Make Digital Stickers?
No, many top Etsy sellers, including myself, are not “designers.” You can create digital stickers in user-friendly programs like Canva and Picmonkey and find commercial-use artwork online to use in your digital products.
How to Turn a Digital Sticker Side Hustle into a Full-Time Business
Interested in taking your digital sticker side hustle to the next level? Here are a few of the top steps you can take to make your digital sticker bundles stand out:
Target the right keywords. As with anything you’re selling online, keywords are crucial in ensuring that your products appear in search results. You’ll want to focus on low-competition but frequently searched keywords to accomplish this. I personally love tools like eRank and EverBee to help me find the best keywords to target. Using the Etsy search bar (as seen above) can also give you insight into what products people are looking for online. Once you identify which keywords to use, add them to your title, tags, descriptions, and social media posts to help your product come up better in search results.
Have a clear aesthetic or purpose for your digital stickers. Your digital sticker bundle should immediately grab someone’s attention. Theming your bundle by color, aesthetic, or purpose (i.e., work-themed stickers, fitness stickers, home management stickers, etc.) will help you stand out amongst other digital sticker sellers. Notice the bundles below, which have clear themes, like ‘Everything NEUTRAL and BOTANTICAL’ or the ‘Ultimate Digital Stickers Collection,’ which features a rainbow of stickers in 50 different colors for color-coding.
Create templates for digital stickers to save time. Bundles of digital stickers are often in the hundreds, or even thousands, for how many stickers are included. As a result, quantity is significant when you are creating your stickers. However, making them one by one will take a lot of work. Instead, make templates for digital stickers that allow you to make simple edits and end up with many stickers. For example, if you design a washi tape-shaped template, you can switch out the pattern, color, and angle of the sticker to create many sticker designs from one template.
Market Your Digital Stickers on Pinterest. Pinterest is among the most popular visual social media platforms out there. Pinterest is my personal favorite because I can set it up where if someone clicks on my pins, they are sent directly to my Etsy product. On top of using smart keywords to help your Pinterest pins stand out, you must frequently pin throughout the day because Pinterest rewards accounts that do. I recommend using a free social media scheduler, like Tailwind, to accomplish this, so you don’t have to manually pin new things several times a day.
Create eye-catching Etsy photos. Don’t sabotage your hard work with low-quality mockups or images. After all, you probably wouldn’t even think of clicking on a listing with poor graphics or images. I like making all my product images in Canva because there are many options for creating mockups, adding text to the pictures for added information, and much more. Remember, the better your images are, the more traffic your Etsy shop will land.
I hope these tips and tricks gave you a good idea of where to start when it comes to launching your digital sticker shop or expanding your current side hustle. If you are looking for a step-by-step guide, check out Digitally Purposed, where I provide exact steps on earning a six-figure income, which I did with my digital products shop in just a few months.
